ABSTRACT
Can we envision a black Europe? Where is this space of “clear darkness” in the center of whiteness? To regard Europe as black or in terms of blackness may seem transgressive, unthinkable, phantasmatic. Rooted in colonial fabrications of indigenous and native life-worlds far away from European space, black subjects have been imagined as Europe's antithetical counters throughout the twentieth century. “The idea of Europe,” as David T. Goldberg notes, “excludes those historically categorized as non-European, as being not white” (2006, 347). How are such machinations of a white Europe sustained in this era of globalization? Why is the social construction of the otherness of “the black other” so central for the sense of Europeanness, even in contemporary Europe?
